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She was courting danger, or maybe danger was courting her. She couldn’t quite tell which way it worked. She had issued the first invitation, but he always came to her. She never once sought him out. She was brave but not quite that brave. It was a chaste sort of courting that involved no touching save for the occasional brush of fingers and glances that were just on the safe side of heated.
Affair .
The word left a bitter taste on her tongue like medicine, but it was a pill she had to swallow because it was one of those truths her heart could not dispute. She didn’t love the man at her side. She didn’t even want him in any way that truly mattered. Her heart had been stolen long ago and not by a pirate.
But the man who had it was slowly but surely breaking it, and Killian Jones was an easy and spiteful choice to soothe the hurt.
The fact that she was choosing easy—as he said humans would—irked at her. She didn’t want to choose the easy path. She wanted to be brave enough to choose the difficult course, but any time it was presented to her, she turned away from it to protect what was left of her love.
She and her husband were more alike than she realized.
And her spiteful choice was no better.
She looked up from her computer to watch him as he gazed out of the window instead of at the book in front of him. He never truly came to read though he chose a new book every time. She could imagine he was thinking of blonde hair, sharp, judging eyes, and a red leather jacket.
She was under no illusions that she was his first choice either.
But she was still a choice which appeased some part of her wounded heart.
He turned his head and looked at her suddenly. She had been so lost in thought that she had forgotten she was staring at him rather blatantly. His lips twitched, and she waited to see if the resulting facial expression would be a smile or a smirk. If he was being kind, it would be a smirk that undermined whatever closeness they had developed. If he were unkind…
He smiled at her. It was small and just a little sad, but it was genuine. It tugged at her heart strings, and some part of her wanted to rush to his side and throw herself into his arms. He had that kind of smile when he chose to use it. That was the smile that she imagined women from all over would fall for. It was the kind of smile that spoke to something deep inside. It was a smile that she could save, if she tried.
It faded quickly the longer she kept his gaze. His eyes were troubled as, she suspected, were hers. Though she found him ridiculously inept and violent, she knew his heart carried similar pain to hers.
She had told him once that she found him irredeemable, but that wasn’t the truth. He had shown a remarkable proficiency for redemption. Love was a selfish but worthy motivator, she thought, and Killian had done, over the course of recent weeks, a great deal to showcase his better half.
He hadn’t apologized, but he was frank. At this point, honesty was far more important to her than remorse. What he had done was in the past—she didn’t even have a scar to remind her of it—and what he was doing now was impressive enough by her standards.
He was far more cooperative than other beasts she could name. And though his past behaviour belied it, he seemed strangely loyal. She hypothesized that he had found villains unworthy of loyalty, and that was the root of his betrayals in the past. He had a code of honour when it mattered which was surprising for a pirate whose sole purpose until recently was messy, violent revenge and whose job description included looting and murder on a regular basis.
It would be rather hypocritical of her to recoil at the amount of blood she could guess he had spilt. She knew her husband’s hands were just as bloody if not more so though it was something she avoided thinking about when possible.
She was not condoning or comfortable with the violence per se, merely resigned. One had to be when living in a town full of villains who no longer quite fit the villain role. They were all sitting in some grey area in between: not entirely heroic but just helpful enough to warrant being left alone instead of lynched by the rest of Storybrooke’s population who were far too ready to go to war, in her opinion.
She blinked, breaking the impressive staring contest she and Killian were waging. She looked back at her computer screen feeling a bit bereft. She could hear him chuckle softly and then the high pitched squeal of the chair as it scraped against the floor. Killian had an antagonistic relationship with library property.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw his hip rest against the edge of her desk.
She looked up at him, affecting an air of indifference.
“How may I help you?”
“Pirate for your thoughts?”
“I’m not sure that’s how the saying goes,” she replied.
“My version is clearly superior,” he said.
“Well then, I am quite sure that I don’t require a pirate for anything, especially my thoughts.”
He arched an eyebrow and shook his head. It was a weak protestation. If she didn’t truly need a pirate—a particular pirate—then he wouldn’t be standing next to her with a bitter but resigned look on his face and his mouth already forming the scathing retort to her lie.
“Aye, most people don’t, love,” he said quietly.
It was scathing still, but the hurt was to himself. That, she didn’t like.
“I might require Killian Jones on occasion though,” she said with a gentle smile to soften the blow he hand landed on himself.
It was a bit mawkish to say out loud, but it had become strangely and unexpectedly true that she did need him. Life, she was beginning to gather, was wicked like that. Take a man full of hate and violence, let him shoot at a woman who had never done him harm, and then allow that woman to take a certain shine to that very same man. Not that she should be surprised, given her track record. Her story with Rumple played out much the same way.
“Lucky for you then that I have taken to visiting libraries,” he responded.
“Yes, lucky me,” she said.
She set her fingers on the keyboard, but she couldn’t quite recall what it was she had been doing before her thoughts had been significantly derailed. The metal tip of a sharp hook pulled the keyboard just out of her reach.
She looked up at Killian. He was contemplating the keyboard he had stolen away from her with an expression she couldn’t decipher. She reached out to pull her keyboard back, but he jerked it away once again with his hook. It perched on the edge of the desk precariously with Killian’s hook the only barrier between it and the floor below, and she found it an apt metaphor for their current predicament.
Looking away from the keyboard, finally, he regarded her silently.
She stared back at him with her hands lying limp in her lap. Words were always a comfort, but she found herself defenceless without the slightest clue what to say. She had lectured this man many times in the past about the state of his villainous heart, his lack of remorse, and every other flaw she could find, but now she thought she deserved the lecture. So she had nothing to say to him that wouldn’t dig them in deeper.
“What do you require me for?”
She had retreated into the chaotic space of her head to avoid the silence that stretched between the two of them, and his voice came as a shock, breaking through the veil of her own swirling thoughts as though he’d punctured it with his hook. She opened her mouth to respond but snapped it shut again helplessly.
She shook her head at him, hoping he would understand. She didn’t want to cause him any pain though he had caused her a considerable amount in the past. She wasn’t vengeful the way so many around her were. That wasn’t her motive for being cruel now.
But there were some things she wasn’t willing to say just yet, and answering that question was at the top of her verboten list. Not the least because she wasn’t quite sure of the answer; only sure that it soothed her to have someone who understood some of her troubles nearby. He caused a certain hush to fall over her discordant feelings.
He scoffed and pulled his hook away from the keyboard. It fell to the floor with a loud clatter that seemed to echo throughout the entire library when, in reality, the sound didn’t carry very far at all.
She remembered him full of alcohol and staggering toward her in the deep, dark night. Then he had held his body as though wounded. It was hunched shoulders, a soft mouth that hid teeth ready to bite, and eyes that darted around indecisively. He looked much the same now: defiant but also frightened, and frightened beasts were prone to lashing out, she knew.
“I’m just not—” she began but shook her head and started over when the sound of her voice didn’t please her. “I’m simply not prepared to—”
He interrupted her this time.
“Bloody hell, woman, neither am I! Do you think that’s why I ask? Because I’m prepared ? No.”
He slammed his fist on the desk where her ill-fated keyboard had been sitting. She flinched away, and he seemed to quiet in response, pulling his hand back to his side.
“You forget, I’ve played this game before, love, and I know how it ends. You should make up your mind before you reach the point of no return. Don’t wait ‘til you’re prepared .”
She watched his hand curl into a fist and then uncurl as his body relaxed, anger bleeding from him as he sighed. He looked down at the keyboard, still on the floor where it had landed, and crouching down, he picked it up with his hand, surveying the empty spaces where keys had popped out on impact. Setting the keyboard gently on her desk, he went to work finding the missing keys and resolutely ignoring her or so it seemed.
“I don’t mean to be cruel,” she said to his back, and he stilled his movements before turning slowly to face her. He smiled at her, but his eyes were a storm.
“It isn’t your cruelty I worry about, Belle; it’s his ,” he said, placing the missing keys on her desk next to the board.
He stood once more, towering above her looking like a dark dream with his wild eyes and his black coat.
“Your brand of cruelty doesn’t end with one or both of us dead,” he continued, his voice hushed and hollow.
Killian’s gaze was focused on her, but he was looking through her. It was that ghost again. Rumple never looked at her like that, like he was remembering his dead wife instead of seeing the living, breathing woman in front of him. Part of her was viciously glad that she took precedence over a dead woman, but another part of her—a bigger part, a better part—considered that it was only because Rumple hadn’t loved her enough to remember her. He only cared for her enough to kill her.
And though she didn’t intend to glorify Killian, she was a little in awe of the depth of feeling he still possessed for this woman who had died so very long ago.
That was the way she wanted to be loved.
She stood and made her way around the desk. Standing in front of him she waited until he refocused on her. His head tipped forward ever so slightly so he could see her face, and he arched an eyebrow in askance.
“I have always wanted to do the right thing, the brave thing, but my position allows for neither. There are no choices that are right or brave. The choices I do have…aren’t even kind. Someone will be hurt no matter what I am or am not prepared to do,” she said, looking up at him.
He brought his hand up to caress her face, drawing the back of it from her cheek to her chin and then dropping it back to his side. His eyes traced the same path as his hand, and at the end, he was looking toward the floor.
“Choose the one that hurts you the least, love,” he said, his voice barely carrying between them. Then he looked up at her, eyes blazing with unspoken emotion, cupped her face once more with a rough hand, and pressed his lips to hers for just a brief moment.
He pulled back just enough so that he could place his forehead against hers. His breath ghosted over her face, warm and laced with an undercurrent of rum. He had been drinking at some point during the day though she hadn’t seen him touch the flask she knew he kept hidden on his person. She knew better than to place the blame for his spontaneous actions on alcohol though. Even drunk, Killian had a far clearer head than most.
She raised her hand to his face, mimicking his on hers, but as soon as her skin made contact with his, he pulled away. The empty space he left behind was cold, as air and reality came rushing back in to fill the vacancy.
She dropped her hand.